Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Jeanine listened with a blank face. She shifted the package of wedding dress around on her lap and then stood up. She wanted to ask when it was that Martha Jane had visited, and for how long, but it would be too humiliating. Jeanine had the sudden but familiar feeling of everything going to pieces, despite anything she did, but she was also becoming angry as well as alarmed.

She said she had to get back, she had left beans on the stove. She put the moth crystals and four oranges and a pound of longhorn cheese into her heavy canvas bag and went out to ask Mr. Joplin to put the spark plugs back in so she could start up her engine and go home, and revive her life and her faith in humanity, or at least men.

Mrs. Joplin watched the ’29 Ford truck roar off down the road, throwing gravel. Then she walked out to the backyard and sat down beside her elderly husband. She had done what she thought she ought to do. Maybe it was the right thing, maybe not. Mr. Joplin raised his head and then glanced down again.

“Well, Pearl, I guess I got that job done.”

“Yes, you did.” They sat at ease, resting within the spotted, tossing shade.

“What was it?”

“You changed that young woman’s oil and cleaned the spark plugs.”

He cleared his throat. He was struggling with the profound shame of knowing that his mind was drifting away; all he had was Pearl to keep him anchored. She watched him sigh heavily and wipe his hands together.

“Pearl, dear,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t know where I am.”

Mrs. Joplin stroked his back. “It’s all right, James,” she said. “Wherever you are, that’s the world.”

JEANINE DROVE BACK the one mile to the house with her foot jammed down on the pedal, and the wind came in all the open truck windows in gusts. Behind her the sheet came unwrapped from the silk wedding dress and the whole package began to flounder about in the backseat. The arms of the wedding dress thrashed around, she could see it in the rearview mirror. The skirt billowed up like a dummy turned upside down, the sheet seemed to be pouring out the window, an escapee. She did not know what to do with it. On the other hand, she could save it for Mayme. Mayme wouldn’t care if it had been made for somebody else. She was so in love with Vernon she’d get married in a bedspread. Jeanine stamped on the brake and came to a halt under the Spanish oak. What would she do without Ross in her life? It would be terrible, it could not happen.

She called Ross as soon as she got in the house. She threw the wedding dress and the sheet onto the kitchen table and dialed his number. She listened impatiently as the party lines got crossed and two men were discussing some sheep that had got out and were up on Jim Ned Creek. Then finally she heard Ross’s voice say, Hello?

“Ross, it’s Jeanine.”

“Hello, girl,” he said.

“Ross, I want to set a date. And the date is…” She paused. She said the first thing that came into her head. “December twelfth.”

Faint voices in the background spoke of three head got out and gone up past Ganlin’s water gap, they were seen yesterday. Finally he said, “What brought this on?”

“Martha Jane Armstrong.”

He laughed. “Jeanine,” he said. “Jeanine darling.”

“Well?”

There was a long pause. Jeanine sat on the kitchen chair and beat her foot on the floor. You could grow hair in the man’s pauses.

“I didn’t tell her to come out here, Jenny. I don’t like being asked to explain myself.”

“Well, did you ask her to go?”

“I did not invite her into the house. When she left, Innis nailed her taillight with a hexagonal nut. He was hiding behind the rock tank.”

“Shame on him,” said Jeanine. “Ha-ha.”

“Stay friends,” said Ross. “You could have no worse enemy than Martha Jane Armstrong.”

Then it was Jeanine who fell into the long gap of a wordless pause. She ran her fingers through her tangled hair and finally said, “All right.”

“Then if you are determined on that date, there is a lot to do.” Her mind vaulted forward to all that there was to do and she banged the toes of her shoes together. “Your ring came,” he said. Nervously she wrote in the air with her forefinger; r-i-n-g.

“Oh good, Ross!” She listened intently against the distant voices crackling on the crossed party lines about looking for Barkley’s merinos as Ross asked her to make lists. Jeanine and her mother and sisters had to present a festive occasion to the world, a celebration that was to be joyful and at the same time corseted with tradition. All the right people had to be invited for fear of offending the wrong people, nothing unlucky must happen, nor could they ignore the dead, who shadowed the event from some other dimension: her father, Ross’s first wife. Like fossils printed in stone they sent faint indications of themselves on down the years, admonishing and reminding because they were still very present in memory and because of the children they had introduced, willy-nilly, into the world of the living.

Jeanine did not like talking on the buzzing, public party line; she wanted to hang up, to say that they would talk later, but Ross wanted her to find a pen and paper and write out an announcement now, this very minute, and take it in to the newspaper in Tarrant when they all went in to catch the train to Galveston and have done with it. She bent over a sheet of lined paper with her tongue between her teeth and her hair falling in her face and wrote, Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard of Palo Pinto County announces the marriage of her daughter Jeanine… and so she was committed.

She put the receiver back into its cradle and looked up at the kitchen. It was somehow a different kitchen. Some shift had taken place. Some alteration in the boards and windows and the kitchen curtains with their jolly orange pigs as she felt her connection to this place suddenly become tenuous and frayed. It was as if she were looking at some memory, already in the past and dearly beloved in each commonplace detail; the braided rug and the old cookstove and Prince Albert asleep on the cool stone of the fireplace hearth.

She folded the paper and put it in her purse and then started the washing to get everyone ready for their weekend in Galveston. She flung clothes into the churning suds of the washing machine and the fumes of the gasoline engine filled the back porch. A strange feeling of being a visitor overcame her; a kind and polite visitor who was helping out with the housework, and who had someplace else to go, someplace exciting.

She sang “Your Cheating Heart” in a hoarse and wobbling voice as she hung tea towels and underpants and brassieres and sheets on the line as clouds skated overhead like glacial soapsuds. She walked through the garden where the fall harvest of trilobite leaves of sweet potatoes appeared, childlike things toasting brown in their earth beds. Her fields all swept of seedling cedar now seemed to belong to somebody else, and so did the orchard. So she walked through the stones of the family graveyard and pulled up a greenbrier sprout that had sprung up with the new rains and had begun to crawl over her grandmother’s headstone. What home had Nannie Tolliver left behind to come here from Northeast Texas, what family graveyards had she abandoned to the greenbrier? You had to wonder. Nannie probably loaded up her trunk with quilts and dishes and the porcelain doll’s head and said Let’s go, Samuel . Jeanine turned away and went into the house, restless, seized by a need for movement.

She threw cold water in her face and then went down into the cotton field. Abel lifted his hat to her; he was on a four-sweep riding cultivator behind Jo-Jo and Sheba. She listened for a moment as he spoke to them, listened to the jingle of the harnesses and the distant sound of the small points slicing through the soil. Tomorrow she would ride the seed drill, which would carry the steel barrels of Paris Green arsenate to kill the weevils and next year when she came back to visit, the new plants would flush out free of infestation. Then she went back into the house again, to stand in front of the electric fan for a moment. In all the valley fields the cotton was expanding into knots of white fiber. It was Tuesday evening; the sky blued with the watercolors of evening. Fibber and Molly burst into the sound waves. Oh, Molly, how patient and sane you are, with your silly and loving husband, how calm in the make-believe world of radio, in some imaginary town that never changes. She finally rested on the veranda steps, slouched back against one of the posts, watching the seamless evening fall across the world.